Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Let there be snark.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

You cannot shame the shameless.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Republicans do not trust women.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Military / Read this when you get a chance.

Reader Interactions

69Comments

  4. 4.

    Frankensteinbeck

    I’m sorry, I disagree with this article because it puts the cart before the horse. Our disengagement from the military is not the cause of our country’s chickenhawk antics. It is the result. The GOP has been selecting for and encouraging meanspirited assholism as a side effect of exploiting racism. We have a very large portion of the population that wants to hurt people. War gets them excited. Hating the Enemy gets them excited. Doing it smart, taking care of our troops, minimizing losses on either side – these things are antithetical to the basic asshole emotion of wanting to hurt someone. Since this group covers the entire GOP plus the national punditariat, it doesn’t take all that many Democrats swayed for one reason or another for America itself, as a whole, to treat war as a game and soldiers as action figures. They disengage from the realities because those realities may not fit their ‘We’re the best, kill the other guy!’ fantasy. They don’t form that fantasy because they’re disengaged.

  6. 6.

    gussie

    Agreed. My father fought in WWII and Korea, and this whole ‘love the troops’ thing freaks him out. The veneration is completely alien to his experience–and the ‘Greatest Generation’ stuff gets up his nose worst of all.

  7. 7.

    srv

    Chickenhawk Nation

    I think that’s generous.

    Bring back the draft. The AVF was a complete failure in curbing adventurism.

  8. 8.

    Pogonip

    Revive the draft, starting with the children and mistresses of Congressmen. Second tier, students of prestigious colleges. Presto! The country will never go to war again.

    More seriously, I encourage everyone to learn about General Smedley Butler.

  9. 9.

    Pogonip

    @gussie: Mine feels the same way. I can remember him looking extremely embarrassed when my South Korean aunt politely thanked him for being in the Kirean War. “I appreciate the thought,” he replied, “but, honestly, I was drafted.”

  10. 10.

    Violet

    @Pogonip: Imagine if the draft started with the net worth of families. The children from the wealthiest families got draft numbers that meant they were selected first. Went down from there. Not about taxes or earnings but total net worth. Poor families’ kids got chosen last. I know it’s impossible, but it’s fun to think about.

  11. 11.

    JPL

    Haven’t read the article yet but earlier spoke with a friend about Palin and her comments about the true patriots. The elite among us during WWII served their country. After Vietnam when we went to all voluntary army, the elite dissociated from that menial task. It was easy for Palin to suggest that those serving were the true patriots, since her son had little choice. Some join out of love of country, some join for a career path and some join because there is nothing else. Before I’m dissed, let me mention that my father and two brothers retired from the military and a nephew is still on active duty.
    Now I’ll read the article.

  12. 12.

    Pogonip

    @Violet: The Congressman’s mistress and children might argue that what’s left of American civilization is no longer worth defending, in which case we could reply, ” So why does your [dad, brother] think some guy from the trailer park should do it?”

  14. 14.

    PhoenixRising

    Bring back the draft.

    My dad’s life was changed by exposure to a racially integrated meritocracy, as was his entire generation (late Silent/early Boomer, AKA the grunts of the civil rights movement and anti-war movements).

  16. 16.

    Linkmeister

    Even when there was a draft the rich managed to buy their way out in many cases. Nonetheless, that’s an important essay and it ought to be widely circulated.

  17. 17.

    JPL

    @Linkmeister: I just skimmed the article and will reread it later. One thing that struck me is the section on the F35. If Senators fought so hard for road funds, in their area as they do for military funds, we would be better off.
    ‘

  19. 19.

    Tommy

    @Linkmeister: Well not totally true. My grandfather came out of college, a medical doctor, from a wealthy family. He enlisted to fight from day one. My other grandfather, who barely got out of high school did the same thing for WWII.

    I don’t think my family is special. I am sure most people have a similar story to what I just said. They didn’t bitch and moan. Asked, call to serve, they just did it. Didn’t bitch nor moan.

  20. 20.

    Schlemazel

    @JPL:
    The European model got the princelings involved in every war as officers, but at least they had skin in the game. Here in the US that did not happen. Wealthy people always had a way out, most famously in the Civil War where you could pay someone to serve for you or pay the draft board a bit more & get off scott free. This was a large part of the “draft riots” that hit NYC as the poor Irish saw their boys dieing while the wealthy WASPS boys played on.

    WWI & II really were the exception but not universally so. Plenty of American princelings got out or got cushy slots but much was made of families like the Roosevelts with kids seeing fire & even dying. That all went to shit in Vietnam, a war nobody wanted to die for so those who could afford to stay in school or get slotted into units like the TANG (See: Lloyd Bensen & G.H.W.Bush crotch fruit).

    As for caring for vets, only WWII (and ‘accidentally’ Korea) vets got a decent shake. That was because there were so few families that did not suffer it was obvious something needed to be done. Once it was ‘those other kids’ that suffered & nobody from your neighborhood or your church or your circle then it was just easier to count the costs & not the debt owed.

  21. 21.

    Linkmeister

    @Tommy: I was thinking of the Civil War, not more recent events (well, except for the “Champagne Wings” of the Air National Guard like the one GWB served in).

    And while I was typing Schlemazel made the same point.

  22. 22.

    mellowjohn

    For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
    But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot. –Rudyard Kipling

  24. 24.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    @Villago Delenda Est: And the veterans especially the retired ones eats this up. Actually they seem ok with the idea of f*cking over future enlistees who want to make the military a career by screwing them out of a pension after 20 years(yep 401K’s), or making them pay more for their medical, and if you get wounded in combat or suffer PTSD in the future, well it sux 2BU! The retirees around me, vote GOP, the congressman that represents me is a Democrat, but like the prior one, he dances to the MIC.

  26. 26.

    Tommy

    @Linkmeister: Look I am so not perfect. Not even close. But if you are going to start a war you might as well go fight it. My family fights wars. We have decided that you don’t start a war if you don’t want to fight it. I am the last person that has not fought wars for our nation and I tend to think maybe peace is a better idea.

  27. 27.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Schlemazel: Wasn’t the plight of WWI veterans during the Great Depression that turned the public opinion against Hoover?
    England was not better, I think it was Kipling who wrote eloquently about the hardships faced by the surviving veterans of the Crimean War.

    ETA: The poem was The Last of the Light Brigade.

  28. 28.

    Woodrow/Asim

    James Fallows is a damned American treasure. For all the pissing that THE ATLANTIC enables, having him and Coates on the payroll, writing things like this and the Representations piece, makes it a strong lean to subscribe.

    I’m really looking forward to consuming and considering this, esp. as the final “trigger” for me to go with Obama in the Primaries was his FOREIGN AFFAIRS piece, with the most nuanced view of exercising military force of all the candidates. I’m really curious what Hart’s recommendations were, in light of what we’ve seen, good and bad, from the Administration.

  29. 29.

    raven

    You know what no one wants to talk about? That the vast majority of people serving in the military during the wars since and including WWII have been nowhere near the shit. E.B. Sledge said that people 100 yards behind the infantry on Pelilu had no idea what it was really like. All this “hero” and “sacrifice” stuff is just so much bullshit. There is no question that those terms define a small minority of those who serve but just a small minority. I drove a fucking truck from north of Saigon to various places in the Mekong Delta. Did people get hurt? Sure, some did but it was the odd angry shot, mine (fuck an IED) or mortar. In WWII and all the others there were millions of support people strung all over the world. REMF’s, FOBBIT’s, whatever you want to call them all this gas is just so much baloney.

  33. 33.

    Tommy

    @raven

    : I drove a fucking truck from north of Saigon to various places in the Mekong Delta. Did people get hurt?

    That is a very hard two sentences to read. I’ve never done anything like that. I can only assume it was a VERY hard thing to do.

  35. 35.

    another Holocene human

    Hi, Sooner! Happy New year!

    Re worship of “the troops” how about conscription of ethnic minorities and the social status of veterans in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire?

    This fascism and hypocrisy and decay may be the cost of empire?

  38. 38.

    Roger Moore

    @Violet:

    Imagine if the draft started with the net worth of families.

    Even better: ask for that and a pony. No Congresscritter who voted for that would get a penny of filthy lucre from the 1% for their next reelection campaign, so it’s substantially less likely than the return of the 90% tax bracket.

  40. 40.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Mr Stagger Lee: It has always bothered me that one of the main aims of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at least in these parts, is to make sure that there’s never a shortage of foreign wars of which to be a veteran.

  41. 41.

    Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason

    @raven:

    E.B. Sledge said that people 100 yards behind the infantry on Pelilu had no idea what it was really like. All this “hero” and “sacrifice” stuff is just so much bullshit.

    You (and Sledge) basically boiled down my discomfort over “Thank you for your service” and “Thank our American heroes.”

  43. 43.

    Matt McIrvin

    I will not advocate bringing back the draft unless it extends to people up to the age of 70, and makes them front-line combat troops. And that will never happen.

    Otherwise, it’ll still just be the old voting to send the young to war. Not shared sacrifice.

  44. 44.

    Ruckus

    @raven:
    I joined the navy. No one on either ship I was on or any base died but people did in the navy. Not anywhere near as many as the mud slingers but then some, like Higgs went to the nam on river boats and they were in the shit. Dad was in WWII navy as a machinery repair man. He would never talk about his time in so I have no idea what it was like for him. But you are right, far more of us served in relative safety than saw the shit. Have a friend who served in the Marines, landed at Da Nang on the day of the Tet Offensive and he never fired his M16 at anyone for the year he was there.
    And as I’ve said here before, I’m no hero, not even close. And having people thank me for my service feels somehow wrong, somehow phony, and yet not one of them has ever seemed anything less than genuine.

  45. 45.

    mainmata

    @Tommy: Yeah, my paternal grandfather was in the Easter Rebellion, had to leave Ireland and ended up in Boston and was promptly drafted into the US army in 1917. He would have been sent right back to Europe within a year but he got malaria in basic training in Quantico VA. Malaria was still common on the east coast back then. So he got a general discharge. (My father and all his brothers were in the Navy in WW II.). My nephew was one of the first stealth fighter bombers in Iraq 1. But our extended family are Liberals, always been. (And I don’t mean the DLC Blue Dog crap.)

  46. 46.

    Soonergrunt

    @Pogonip: FOBbit–mix FOB (Forward Operating Base)* and hobbit–Tolkien’s mythical folk who spend their time in leisure pursuits and farming and contribute very few people and very little energy to fighting Sauron.
    A Fobbit is a REMF for the modern era.

    *FOBs are the big bases loaded down with heavy infrastructure, as opposed to the Combat Outposts (COPs), Patrol Bases (PBs) and Vehicle Patrol Bases (VPB) that are more forward and more austere and smaller. FOBs generally have hospitals, PXs, 1 or more large gyms, air conditioned/heated structures, PX food courts with pizza shops, Burger Kings, Dairy Queens, Baskin Robbins, clean running water, hot chow 24×7, movie theatres, internet service, etc. Some of the larger ones have Zumba classes and so forth. Also marked by an obsession with everybody wearing a reflective belt 24/7 so that they don’t get run over inside the perimeter because they’re hard to see in their camouflage uniforms.

  47. 47.

    Bill Arnold

    @Pogonip:

    damn autocorrect

    can be turned off (in the iphone at least – settings->general->keyboard). (It still spell checks.)
    (This is for those who don’t know it can be turned off.)

  48. 48.

    Tree With Water

    Thanks for that link, Sooner. After reading it, a few different stories sprang to mind: Senator Joe McCarthy stating during the Army-McCarthy hearings (I paraphrase), “I don’t believe the U.S. Army treats soldiers like cattle”, and instantaneously being horse laughed down by the roomful of people who had just fought the war; Vinegar Joe Stillwell reporting to War Department a week or so after Pearl harbor, and reacting to the chaos he witnessed by writing in his diary of an overwhelming urge to command the entire building, “Quiet. I order you all to remain perfectly still and perfectly silent of the next 5 minutes” (again, I paraphrased); and finally, George Marshall’s sage advice regarding funding the military, “Give them half of what they ask for, and double their missions”. I think that one is pretty much on the money. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed reading the military history of America’s armed forces, and it has served to inform me of many things that escape the attention of voters that haven’t. The country would be made wiser if more people did read more history books. A lot smarter, in fact.

  49. 49.

    mclaren

    Fallows’ article is absurd to the point of hallucinatory delusion.

    The “9/11 generation of heroes” are a bunch of rapists and felons and gang members.

    See the article “U.S. is recruiting misfits for army: Felons, racists, gang members fill in the ranks,” The San Francisco Chronicle, 1 October 2006.

    In many ways, what happened to Petty Officer Second Class Rebecca Blumer after she was roofied and raped by three Army officers she met in a bar not far from base was far worse than the attack itself. Her superiors became more intent on prosecuting her for D.U.I. than on finding out what really happened to this promising young intelligence analyst. What’s worse is that her brutal story, recounted in riveting detail by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely in this month’s Rolling Stone magazine, is far from uncommon. The military, as films like The Invisible War and Erdely’s article show, has a rape problem of epidemic proportions. It is estimated that one in three military women are raped by fellow troops, twice the number of their civilian counterparts. One survivor of multiple rapes quoted in Erdely’s article calls the military a “giant rape cult.” In 2010, the DoD found that 19,000 service members were sexually assaulted. Of those a paltry 3,100, or 13.5 percent, were reported, and of those only 17 percent were prosecuted. All too often, attackers receive a slap on the wrist while their victims lose their careers and their futures, sometimes falling into homelessness, despair and suicidal thoughts.

    Source: “Inside the military’s “giant rape cult: As many as one in three military women are raped by fellow troops,” Salon.com, 14 February 2013.

    The leaders of America’s military are thuggish careerist incompetents who eagerly throw their subordinates under the bus in order to advance themselves, then dash through a revolving door into lavishly-paid positions working for defense contractors.

    America’s military in its current state couldn’t defeat the Tijuana police force. The U.S. military is the most grotesque group of thieving poltroons, ass-kissers, goose-steppers, and incompetent cowards ever assembled under arms since Xerxes’ slave army got whipped into action at Thermopylae.

    This explains why America’s military hasn’t won a single war since 1945. It’s the most inept self-serving corrupt groups of clowns in uniform in modern history. The Keystone Kops look like a group of Napoleons compared to America’s military.

    The United States has been at war — major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions — nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions.

    Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face. They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again.

    So here are five straightforward lessons — none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country — that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare:

    1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn’t work. Ever.

    2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn’t solve them. Never.

    3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to “stabilize” or “protect” or “liberate” countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force.

    4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its “warriors,” the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars.

    5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in history,” the evidence is in: it isn’t.

    Source: “A Record of Unparalleled Failure,” Tomdispatch.com, 10 June 2014.

    Despite the sedulous praise for these incompetent rapists and thugs, the reality remains that the typical American military office couldn’t figure out how to empty a boot even if the instructions are printed on the heel:

    Why does the American military produce the most innovative and entrepreneurial leaders in the country, then waste that talent in a risk-averse bureaucracy? Military leaders know they face a paradox. A widely circulated 2010 report from the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College said: “Since the late 1980s … prospects for the Officer Corps’ future have been darkened by … plummeting company-grade officer retention rates. Significantly, this leakage includes a large share of high-performing officers.” Similar alarms have been sounded for decades, starting long before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made the exit rate of good officers an acute crisis. When General Peter Schoomaker served as Army chief of staff from 2003 to 2007, he emphasized a “culture of innovation” up and down the ranks to shift the Army away from its Cold War focus on big, conventional battles and toward new threats. In many respects (weapons, tactics, logistics, training), the Army did transform. But the talent crisis persisted for a simple reason: the problem isn’t cultural. The military’s problem is a deeply anti-entrepreneurial personnel structure. From officer evaluations to promotions to job assignments, all branches of the military operate more like a government bureaucracy with a unionized workforce than like a cutting-edge meritocracy.

    After interviewing veterans who work at some of the most dynamic and innovative companies in the country, I’m convinced that the military has failed to learn the most fundamental lessons of the knowledge economy. And that to hold on to its best officers…it will need to undergo some truly radical reforms—not just in its policies and culture, but in the way it thinks about its officers.

    Source: “Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving — Why are so many of the most talented officers now abandoning military life for the private sector? An exclusive survey of West Point graduates shows that it’s not just money. Increasingly, the military is creating a command structure that rewards conformism and ignores merit,” The Atlantic magazine, January/February 2011.

    The U.S. military is one of America’s premier leadership factories. But the product it manufactures is in decline.

    Seven years ago, the number of young officers willing to recommit after their initial tours of duty dropped precipitously. Before the Iraq war, three-quarters of Army officers stayed for a career, a number that dropped to just two-thirds starting in 2006. The broken pipeline was initially blamed on the sputtering war effort in Iraq, but in fact the problem is a deep-rooted one. The Army has bled talent for decades, a consequence of a deeply dysfunctional organization that poorly matches jobs with talent and doesn’t trust its officers to make choices about their own careers.

    Source: “How to lose great leaders? Ask the Army,” The Washington Post, 5 February 2013.

    Footnote: anyone who swallows this crap about “the army producing great leaders” needs to take a look at some of the Army’s allegedly `great leaders.’ General David Petraeus lied to congress, scammed his president, rammed through a failed counterinsurgency strategy that completely fell apart, then fled the military for the CIA while cheating on his wife.

    This is a great leader?

    On what planet?

  50. 50.

    Malaclypse

    I have met serious people who claim that the military’s set-apart existence is best for its own interests, and for the nation’s. “Since the time of the Romans there have been people, mostly men but increasingly women, who have volunteered to be the praetorian guard,

    If the modern military can be compared to the Praetorian Guard, this is not a comforting thought.

  51. 51.

    mclaren

    @Malaclypse:

    The comparison to the Praetorian Guard is apt, however, since the Guard typically chose the next Roman emperor.

    Today, the U.S. military along with military contractors and congressmen and senators whose districts and states get money from those military contracts is the single most powerful constituency in Washington D.C. As a consequence, the military-indsutrial constituency today does in fact pick the next president. This article about Hillary Clinton says it all:

    … waiting in the wings, Hillary Clinton just may prove to be what the defense establishment has been waiting for, and more. Superior to all in money, name recognition, and influence, she is poised to compete aggressively for the Democratic nomination for president. She might just win the Oval Office. And by most measures she would be the most formidable hawk this country has seen in a generation.

    “It is clear that she is behind the use of force in anything that has gone on in this cabinet. She is a Democratic hawk and that is her track record. That’s the flag she’s planted,” said Gordon Adams, a national security budget expert who was an associate director in President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget.

    Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who has spent her post-service days protesting the war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, is more blunt. “Interventionism is a business and it has a constituency and she is tapping into it,” she tells TAC. “She is for the military industrial complex, and she is for the neoconservatives.”

    Source: “The military industrial candidate: Hillary Clinton prepares to launch the most formidable hawkish presidential campaign in a generation,” The American Conservative, 20 November 2014.

    Because of the political power of its constituency, the U.S. military-police-prison-surveillance-torture complex now controls American domestic and foreign policy. A “soft coup” occurred after 9/11 in which the military-police-prison-surveillance-torture complex now controls America, rather than civilians.

    We’re seeing the police version of this extremely dangerous soft coup in the New York police exerting power over Mayor Bill deBlasio. In effect, any effort by civilians to reassert control over public policy is seen by the police or the military as a form of treason, and results in the military or the police using their political power to crush and demonize and destroy the career of any civilian who tries to wrest control of public policy from the military or the police.

    As a result, public policy and public spending is now determined entirely and exclusively by the military and the police. Only such public monies can be spent on things like medicare or K-12 schooling or highway infrastructure as happen to be left over after the police get all the prisons and the prison guards and the lavish military weapons and the overtime spending they demand, and after the U.S. military gets all the insanely overpriced non-working Buck Rogers superweapons and $20,000 kevlar K-9 protective vests it demands.

    To put it bluntly, civilian “leaders” no longer make policy in America. They merely fight over the crumbs of funding left over after the police and the military have issued their unalterable edicts on what must be spent, and how.

  53. 53.

    raven

    @Ruckus: You know a jarhead that wasn’t the second coming of Chesty Puller?? Awesome! I always thought there was no support, commo, arty, transportation or any of that in the USMC because every one I have ever met walked point.

  54. 54.

    Bruce Perry

    This article is rather timely for me as I have just finished Paul Fussell’s excellent book about the American military and public during WWII. Fussell’s book parallels Fallow’s article but in much more detail. Highly recommended if the article appeals to you and you want more detail.

  56. 56.

    Chris

    This is an older take on the same topic.

    Money quote:

    For the most part, and having had little or no first-hand experience with it, the youthful civilian elites who assumed government power in the 1990s were wholly innocent of any genuine understanding of the true nature and powerful imperatives intrinsic to the armed forces. Moreover, these political elites were not antimilitary, despite what many in uniform believed at the time. Of course, few of them considered military people their social or intellectual equals; rather, they viewed the armed forces with the kind of pretentious cordiality usually reserved for faithful servants. What they did appreciate was that the military was extraordinarily competent, and they reveled in the notion that it could be “tasked” to do their bidding.

  58. 58.

    Chris

    Also, unmentioned in the article is the role that other, civilian agencies are supposed to play in foreign policy (State, USAID, CIA which was made civilian for a reason…) – and the fact that U.S. foreign policy over the decades has increasingly suffered from “have hammer, see only nails” syndrome, with DOD as the hammer. Would’ve been curious to hear his take on that.

  60. 60.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not.

    Look, another idiot who doesn’t know crap about American history Perhaps the writer should discuss how the troops were treated after the Revolution, ACW and WWI.

  61. 61.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @mclaren: Well you cited a signal article and that proves it. Meanwhile, want to explain to me how Hillary is suddenly the darling of the military after the military spent the 90s hating on the Clintons for the defense spending cuts, Dont’ Ask, Don’t Tell and the Tailhook Scandal reforms?

  62. 62.

    Bill Kirsch

    @Pogonip: REMF and FOBBIT are basically the same thing. FOB = Forward Operating Base. These are generally huge bases in Iraq and Afghanistan where it’s possible to work a desk job and never have anyone try to kill you. So if you worked in these FOBs and never left the safety of the security zone then you were a FOBBIT.

  63. 63.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Just heard a promo on NPR that Fallows will be on All Things Considered today to talk about this.

  65. 65.

    Dave

    @Bill Kirsch: And there ain’t nothing wrong with being a fobbit as long as you don’t try to pretend otherwise. Are there a huge number of O-4’s and O-5’s that are being paid decently to drink a huge amount of coffee, watch a movies, and generate reports that are miles from reality? Yes, yes there are. Are there fobbit jobs that are absolutely essential also true. Do I hold that against anyone on a FOB not really, you go where you are sent, unless they are douche-bags pretending to things they haven’t. I get what drives that; the feeling that you weren’t really part of it. And I don’t like the videos hunting after the stolen valor guys (it fetishizes service) because it seems to me that most of them have issues and need help not condemnation.

  66. 66.

    NorthLeft12

    As a Canadian living right across the St. Clair River from Michigan I have little different perspective. The tragedy has more to do with overweening nationalist pride, of which the military is the most obvious and influential element. Sports, especially football [not soccer, oh no, never soccer], basketball, and baseball are also used to display this fervour. Business used to be like that, until the owners found the joys of globalization and the increased profits to be made by outsourcing, etc.

    But in the military’s case the actual soldiers are never looked at as individuals, but as members of a great collective ….. the “troops”. That much hated phrase “Support the troops”, is all about supporting the wars they are involved in and supplying the military with the hardware to supposedly win that war. It is never about looking after the damaged soldiers who are no longer serving. And it also never means looking after the immediate, everyday life needs of the soldiers and their families when they are not in combat. i.e.. poor housing, sub minimum wage pay, need to live on food stamps, etc.

    In Canada we are in the midst of a public debate [not a loud one] about the role and importance of our military. The conservatives are pushing for a bigger role, for reasons that most Canadians don’t understand….outside of the world is a scary place and we must support our more aggressive allies.

  67. 67.

    Crone

    Thanks for the piece. I had two responses: 1. With the horrendous exception of 9/11, we have not experienced war at home since 1865. I hope we would have far more intelligent and engaged discussion of the military and its consequences if our towns were being bombed and our cities were taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees. 2. It’s possible that the current discussion of police forces (our internal military) is the kind of attention and passion that Fallows suggests for the Armed Services.

  68. 68.

    RaptorFence

    I enjoyed the article, but I think Fallow’s is trying to cram too many issues into one piece. I see two articles

    1) Praetorianism, where the military believes itself to be morally superior to the nation it serves (see, Bacevich). He discusses this, rightly, in terms of empty, laudatory praise and never being held accountable for failings. However, I think he glosses over the social and, more worryingly, geographic separation of the military from society.

    2) the Military-Industrial Complex, where interests beyond those of civil society are determining where we fight and what we use to do it. Here is where I have my biggest issue with the article. He approvingly cites ADM Mullen saying its “too easy to go to war”, but that is part of the problem: in our system, the military doesn’t get to determine this. (And deciding when we don’t go to war is as much a problem as deciding when we do).

    I am sympathetic to the argument that there are too few checks on the decision to use military force, but this is not a decision for the military to make. And the military has been attempting to shape that decision since the 1970s, when Abrams, as part of standing up the AVF, put CS and CSS functions in the guard and reserve. He did this explicitly so that future conflicts would require a call-up–making it harder to use force (back to ADM Mullen’s goal above).

  69. 69.

    carolus

    @RaptorFence:

    Outstanding comment.

    Fallows, I think, only skims the surface and doesn’t really answer any of the questions he poses.

    WRT to the MIC, part of the problem is the industrial base. Very few companies can build subs. And you really can’t tell these companies that we don’t need any subs right now but that we may be in the market for one in 20 or so years. Similarly, that’s why every shipyard or aircraft manufacturer seems to get at least a piece of every contract; a US Senator who can’t deliver that won’t be Senator long.

Comments are closed.